The Pentagon is reportedly aiming for U.S. military installations to be able to continue essential operations for at least 90 days, or roughly three months, without any external support. The installation of new small nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is key to this part of a larger plan called Fortress America. The main intent is to ensure America’s armed forces can remain functional and ready to protect the homeland in the face of any massive disruptions to power grids and other supply chains due to major conflicts or other crises. For years, TWZ has been sounding the alarm about the glaring vulnerabilities of America’s critical civilian energy infrastructure, including to drone swarms and cyberattacks, which could cripple key military capabilities right where they live.

Fox News was first to report on the 90-day base resiliency goal yesterday, citing documents it said it reviewed. This is part of the extremely wide-reaching Fortress America initiative the Pentagon announced last month, which covers everything from improved physical and cyber defenses at facilities to securing reliable access to critical defense industrial resources. The “Fortress” in Fortress America is technically an acronym that stands for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy Supply, and Survivability.

Today, at Secretary Hegseth’s direction, the Department of War is announcing FORTRESS America—a national insurance policy for the American homeland.

Every major military installation in America will generate its own power.

We are bringing our critical supply chains home.

We… https://t.co/2kMQtw2r81 pic.twitter.com/Ptu8VQ5pv3

— Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellASW) September 30, 2026

“Under FORTRESS, every major military installation in the continental United States would be expected to sustain essential operations independently for at least 90 days, including access to electricity, water, fuel and communications,” according to Fox.

Fox News’ story also includes comments about Fortress America from Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell, but it is unclear if he explicitly confirmed the 90-day target. TWZ has reached out for more information.

Parnell did put particular emphasis on the importance of reducing reliance on civilian power generation as part of the larger Fortress America plan. Previous reports have said that Parnell was key to formulating this initiative. He has also been discussed as a potential frontrunner to become the next Secretary of the Army.

“Power is combat now. Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines and just basic military command structures,” Parnell told Fox. “We don’t want to rely on standard civilian municipal infrastructure to run our national defense. We just simply can’t. It’s an intolerable risk.”

It should be pointed out here that some U.S. military bases do have their own power plants now, but this is not something that is far from universal across the board.

Secretary Pete Hegseth made similar comments when he first unveiled the Fortress America initiative during a speech to service members at the U.S. Marine Corps’ base in Quantico, Virginia, in September.

“We are launching Fortress America, a national insurance policy for the American homeland,” Hegseth said at that time. “Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power, independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid by cyber attack, by sabotage, or by any means, our bases stay lit, our aircraft keep flying, our command centers never go dark.”

Fox News’ report says that “portable nuclear reactors,” as well as “large-scale battery storage and microgrids capable of disconnecting military installations from the civilian electrical grid,” are key elements of the plan to achieve this independence when it comes to generating electricity.

The U.S. military, in cooperation with the Department of Energy, has already been heavily investing in the development and installation of so-called microreactors at bases across the country. In August, the U.S. Army, in partnership with the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), notably cut new deals with five companies as part of a plan to install more than 20 microreactors at bases, starting in 2028. This effort, called the Janus program, is not limited to Army installations.

The video below offers an overview of one of several microreactor designs the U.S. military is currently pursuing.

Establishing new microgrids and other supporting energy infrastructure has also been an important focus for the U.S. military in recent years.

Details about how bases are expecting to maintain supplies of water and fuel, as well as communications connectivity, for 90 days or more are, as yet, still not entirely clear. All branches of the U.S. military have already been exploring new and novel options for ensuring the availability of water and fuel in future contingencies, though generally with more of an eye toward tactical operations. Relevant developments, including the possibility of using a process called carbon transformation to turn ambient air into fuel, could easily be applicable in a homeland defense scenario.

Fox News’ story also makes no mention of how sufficient food for personnel at these facilities would be sustained, but that would have to be part of the equation. In his remarks in September, Secretary Hegseth also made clear that making sure supply chains delivering munitions, medicine, and even blood would be unbroken in any future crisis was part of the Fortress America vision. As already mentioned, the initiative also extends much more broadly into matters of physical force protection, cyber defense, and the resilience of America’s defense industrial base.

“For decades, we built the most powerful military in the world,” Hegseth said at Quantico. Then we “regrettably made it dependent on foreign mines for rare earths, on overseas factories for microchips, on foreign supply chains for weapons, and on a civilian power grid to keep the lights on at our bases.”

“We’re bringing our critical supply chains home: the rare earths, the specialty metals, the semiconductors, the propellants, mined in America, refined in America, built in America by American workers,” he added at the time. “We are building long-overdue strategic reserves, deep enough to fight through disruption.”

More specific details about how the Pentagon now intends to pursue these aims have yet to be more fully defined.

“The Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment is directed to stand up the FORTRESS America Program Office within thirty (30) days,” according to a memo dated September 30, which was released after Hegseth’s September speech. “The Program Office shall report directly to the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment who will appoint a member of the Senior Executive Service to lead the day-to-day operations, assisted by a two-star Military Advisor, and shall begin as a lean core cell that scales to full operating capability within months – delivering results in weeks, not years.”

There is also a question of how much of the Fortress America initiative will actually be new. As mentioned, just when it comes to increased energy resiliency, including through the installation of new microreactors, this is something that has already been top of mind for the U.S. military for years now. In 2022, the U.S. Army had a publicly stated goal for every one of its bases to have its own microgrid by 2035 as part of a larger plan to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. In 2024, the Department of the Air Force rolled out its own Installation Infrastructure Action Plan (I2AP) that included a target to have new microgrids in place at 16 bases by Fiscal Year 2030. In May, the U.S. Navy announced plans to demonstrate the ability of the supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford to act as a floating nuclear power plant as part of broader “energy resilience and mission assurance” plans.

The U.S. military has also already been heavily engaged in efforts to secure access to critical resources, especially rare Earth elements in light of China’s continued dominance in that market globally, and otherwise expand America’s domestic defense industrial base. Physical hardening of bases, especially against emerging drone threats, has been more of a heated debate, as TWZ has been following closely for some time now. However, even before Fortress America was unveiled last month, there had been signs that institutional attitudes were shifting.

“The [Fortress America] program aligns basing and infrastructure projects to ensure they are collectively advancing toward greater independence,” the aforementioned September 30 memo itself notes.

There are additional questions to be answered as to how the U.S. military expects to fund its expansive Fortress America ambitions and the schedules for implementing them. This will all be heavily influenced by how much the initiative leverages efforts that were already ongoing. At the same time, concerns about underinvestment in infrastructure modernization, in general, across America’s armed forces, and the worrisome cascading impacts thereof, are hardly new.

There are still key elements of the Fortress America initiative that have yet to be fully proven out. This is particularly visible when it comes to microreactors, which hold the promise of being simpler and safer to build and operate compared to traditional nuclear power plants. Despite significant progress with this technology just in recent years, environmental, proliferation, and other concerns continue to be raised. You can read more about all of this here.

Today, the Department of War will execute Operation Windlord, the first C-17 airlift of a nuclear reactor, in partnership with the Department of Energy and Valar Atomics.

Three C-17s Globemasters carrying the 8 modules of the Ward250 reactor will fly from March ARB to Hill AFB. pic.twitter.com/uIL7LMxACQ

— Isaiah Taylor – making nuclear reactors (@isaiah_p_taylor) February 15, 2026

On top of all this, it should be noted here that the U.S. military and the rest of the U.S. government already have mechanisms in place to ensure key functions can continue, even in the midst of the gravest of crises, such as a limited nuclear attack. This is known as continuity of government planning, and includes a network of hardened and otherwise resilient facilities designed to support continued military operations and other activities in those ‘doomsday’ scenarios. But these facilities are few in number and focus on strategic capabilities compared to what the Fortress America plan envisions.

At the same time, the dangers posed to civilian power grids in the United States, in particular, are only growing in scale and scope, both in the physical and cyber domains. Existing domestic U.S. energy infrastructure is aging and has been increasingly strained to meet routine day-to-day demands for decades now.

The potential for uncrewed aerial attacks on power plants and power lines has been real for years. The basic barrier to entry when it comes to weaponized drones, including converted commercial types, is also already low. Drone threats, broadly speaking, are only set to expand as swarming technology and artificial intelligence-driven capabilities continue to proliferate, as you can read more about in this past TWZ feature. A well-informed enemy could concentrate a small number of resources on highly critical points in the grid to have vastly outsized effects, using drones or any other kinetic means.

The threat of various types of cyberattacks is also no longer limited to blockbuster movies and other popular media. This was made clear all the way back in 2021 with the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, a key American oil pipeline system, and has only become more evident since then, including in the course of the war in Ukraine. U.S. authorities have run major exercises to help prepare for exactly these kinds of threats in the past. These are also capabilities where the barrier to entry has been steadily lowering over the years. Increasingly open access to powerful artificial intelligence agents with the ability to overwhelm networks and software to find critical vulnerabilities faster than humans can react is perhaps the most concerning layer of risk.

We have been reporting on this coming together for some time, it’s incredibly important. More so than a new fighter or an additional destroyer every couple years. Absolutely critical, and becoming more so with each passing day. Yes it’s scary, but it’s far scarier not doing this https://t.co/u09x0PeHZ7

— Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) October 25, 2026

If a major conflict with a global competitor like China were to break out, physical and cyberattacks on energy infrastructure would be an extremely attractive avenue to hobble U.S. military forces, including airpower, before they can even leave their bases. The capacity to threaten grids in the United States, at least to certain degrees, has become worryingly within reach of smaller nation-states, as well as non-state actors and even lone wolf attackers, too. Firmly attributing cyberattacks to a nation-state, at all, can be challenging.

There is also a secondary component to all of this for responding to major natural disasters, which are another way U.S. grids can end up being knocked out for extended periods of time. These same circumstances could easily leave military bases, as well as their surrounding communities, without access to fresh water and other supplies. The U.S. military routinely plays a key role in responding to such crises.

“This is not a wait-and-see kind of a thing. We want to move out pretty quickly to get to that energy [resilience]. Those solutions can include investments in microgrids, battery backup storage,” a senior U.S. defense official said last week at a Defense Writers Group roundtable, according to a separate report from Air & Space Forces Magazine. “First and foremost, it’s doing the assessments of the installations to make sure we understand power generation and where we’re going to go with that, and then getting those deployed.”

The Pentagon is certainly making a new push now to make sure that, as Secretary Hegseth put it last month, “America cannot be starved out, shut down, or cut off.” However, there is clearly still work to be done to meet a goal of bases being able to go three months without outside help and the many other aims of the Fortress America plan.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post 90 Days No Help: Fortress America’s Goal To Make Bases Resilient Bastions In A Crisis appeared first on TWZ.

The U.S. military has successfully demonstrated a new lower-cost receiver that could form part of a future over-the-horizon (OTH) radar. The testing also raises the question of whether the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) research site in Alaska, which the U.S. Air Force transferred away more than a decade ago, could be repurposed for operational use in this role. A new radar of this kind would help the United States plug critical gaps in surveillance coverage over the ever-more strategic Arctic region. Canada is notably already pursuing a multi-billion-dollar OTH radar project in cooperation with Australia for this exact purpose.

The U.S. military put out a press release yesterday regarding the testing of the newly developed receiver array, which occurred between September 7 and September 11. This was the culmination of a series of “Arctic air domain awareness” experiments conducted cooperatively by U.S. and Canadian authorities over the past three years.

The final round of experimentation last month “examined whether an existing high-frequency transmitter [HAARP], paired with a newly developed, low-cost [16-element high-frequency] receiver array, could detect aircraft beyond the coverage of current long-range radar sites,” according to the release. “The effort focused on improving awareness across a region where vast distances, harsh weather and limited infrastructure present challenges for air surveillance.”

“Researchers used the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program [HAARP] facility and a receiver array in Cold Bay developed by MITRE to collect data on participating aircraft over the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea,” the release added. “MITRE also supported the effort throughout the three-year experiment series and designed and executed the field experiment in partnership with government, scientific, and operational participants.”

The remote HAARP site was built in the 1990s as part of a joint U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy effort. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was also involved. The central component of the 33-acre facility is an array of 180 crossed-dipole antennas, which can transmit up to 3.6 megawatts of radio frequency energy, according to the Air Force.

The primary purpose of HAARP was to provide U.S. government and independent researchers with a state-of-the-art facility to explore ionospheric phenomena. On the U.S. military side, work was focused on improving long-range surveillance and communications capabilities, including ways to communicate with submerged submarines. Over the years, HAARP has also been the subject of several entirely unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

In 2014, the U.S. Air Force announced that it would shutter the HAARP site and dismantle it. However, the following year, the decision was instead made to transfer it to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which has continued to operate it as a civilian research facility.

“During an experimental air domain awareness initiative, HAARP served as a high-power illuminator, transmitting signals toward the ionosphere to support the detection of airborne targets over Alaska’s maritime approaches,” according to the captions of several pictures that accompanied the release yesterday. “The experiment evaluated bistatic over-the-horizon detection methods to explore potential improvements in long-range surveillance and air domain awareness across Alaska’s maritime approaches.”

The most common types of OTH radars are so-called ‘skywave’ or ‘backscatter’ designs. They usually consist of two large and geographically separated arrays of antennas. The ‘illuminator’ array pumps out signals that are bounced off the ionosphere, the ionized layer of Earth’s upper atmosphere, at a specific angle so that they return to the ‘receiver’ array. Objects of interest (in the air and/or on the surface depending on the specific configuration) are detected in the process. As TWZ has previously written:

“Commonly, radars are limited by line of sight due to the curvature of the Earth in relation to the altitude they are operating at. OTHRs overcome this critical limitation, but with some major drawbacks.”

…

“While they offer much lower fidelity than many of their line-of-sight counterparts in most cases, they make up for it in huge range, hundreds of miles to thousands of miles (1,500 miles is common, for instance, for powerful military sky wave/backscatter OTHR systems) and a large coverage area. The sky wave type of OTHRs achieve this by bouncing their radio waves off the ionosphere to a coverage area where they hit targets and return the same way to the receiving station. The angle at which the radio waves hit the ionosphere dictates the range, and that angle is limited to a specific envelope or the waves won’t properly bounce back toward Earth. As such, placing the radar in the right place in relation to the targeted surveillance area or areas, to begin with, is key.”

In the testing last month, Air Force E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) radar planes, HC-130J Combat King II rescue aircraft, and KC-135 aerial refueling tankers “served as cooperative targets, providing known positions against which researchers could compare the experimental data,” according to the official release. “The team successfully completed testing, meeting or exceeding its test execution objectives. Initial results show the system was successfully able to achieve full skywave (beyond line of sight) detections of aircraft and correlation to truth flights. Thorough data analysis is ongoing.”

The release also says that the tests “explored how existing infrastructure and emerging technology could complement current surveillance capabilities.” This raises the possibility that the HAARP site, specifically, might be utilized as part of a new OTH radar. Whether or not this is actually under consideration is still unclear, and TWZ has reached out for more information.

Regardless, OTH radars have been experiencing something of a renaissance in recent years in the United States and elsewhere globally. Separate reports just in the past day or so have highlighted what appears to be significant progress on at least one part of a long-planned OTH radar in Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave.

Outside of Alaska, the U.S. military has been working to establish a Tactical Mobile Over-the-Horizon Radar (TACMOR) site in the South Pacific archipelago nation of Palau. The originally stated goal had been to finish work on this facility in 2026, but the project has faced legal challenges.

As already mentioned, OTH radars have also been part of U.S. plans to improve surveillance coverage in the Arctic. Like the recent testing in Alaska, there has been significant cooperation with Canada in this regard over the years, including through the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

Today, NORAD relies heavily on a network of ground-based radars called the North Warning System (NWS) to provide aerial surveillance coverage in the High North. The radars that make up the NWS are also all pointed northward, and none of them provide the kind of wide-area long-range coverage that an OTH design would offer.

The NWS reflects a long-standing focus on monitoring for aerial threats heading across the North Pole toward North America, especially possible nuclear strikes from Russia (and the Soviet Union before it). However, new avenues for geostrategic competition in the Arctic with Russia, as well as China, over natural resources, from oil and natural gas to fish and other sealife, as well as trade routes have emerged in recent years amid receding ice and other impacts of global climate change. This, in turn, has only prompted growing demand for surveillance coverage.

“We need a layered sensing grid, from [the] seafloor to the space layer. And we have no choice. It has to be layered and deep, a defense in depth, from a sensing point of view,” Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Maj. Gen. Chris McKenna, head of 1 Canadian Air Division and the Canadian NORAD Region, also said during a panel discussion at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) annual Warfare Symposium in 2025, at which TWZ was in attendance. “And I will say I suffer from an insufficiency of ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] in the Arctic on a daily basis. And I am fighting for information.”

McKenna was responding at the time to a direct question about gaps in so-called “domain awareness” in and around the Arctic and how to address them.

“I think there’s an importance here of not just air domain, but also space domain, and having a sufficiency of ISR in the Arctic to actually build you the [domain awareness] picture,” he added. “I haven’t really touched on over-the-horizon radar, but I certainly can get into it. I think that’s a really important capability given the austerity of the Arctic and the need for it to cue other things.”

For its part, Canada is now building its own new Arctic Over The Horizon Radar (A-OTHR), at an estimated cost of more than $4 billion. In an announcement last year that caught many off guard, the Canadian government announced that it would be leveraging technology originally developed for Australia’s Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) to support this development. It is also important to note here that relations between Canadian authorities and the Trump administration have been and continue to be heavily strained over a variety of issues, which has prompted broad concerns about future defense and security cooperation.

Back in the United States, OTH radar plans are also now tied in with the broader Golden Dome air and missile defense initiative. Golden Dome is seeking to establish new layers of defense around the U.S. homeland against a wide array of threat types, and puts major emphasis on new space-based sensor and interceptor capabilities. Expanded defensive architectures within the Earth’s atmosphere are also part of this plan.

“Adversaries are developing and building advanced nuclear and conventional delivery capabilities,” U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Jarrard, Vice Commander of the U.S. element of NORAD and Deputy Commander of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), warned at the annual Space & Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium in August. This includes “cruise, hypersonic, and ballistic missiles, as well as fractional orbital bombardment systems, or FOBS, to threaten not only Alaska and Hawaii, but the entire continent of the United States.”

Chinese hypersonic and other developments, in particular, enable new modes of attack that “can approach North America from the south, rather than the traditional northerly vector for which our legacy early warning radars were designed,” Jarrard continued. “The Chinese have also been building a conventionally-armed ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] equipped with hypersonic glide vehicles that can range [sic] targets throughout Alaska, providing Chinese leaders strike options against our homeland below the nuclear threshold.”

“Russia’s advanced missiles, like the nuclear-armed Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, are designed to circumvent the ground-based radars used by NORAD and NORTHCOM to detect and characterize an inbound threat, and challenge the ability to provide threat warning and attack assessment,” he added.

New OTH radars positioned in Alaska and elsewhere in the Pacific will not be able to address all of these threat developments alone. At the same time, the recent testing leveraging the HAARP site is another step toward meeting demands for sorely needed expanded long-range radar coverage in the Arctic.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post Alaska’s HAARP Site Now Being Used To Test New Air Force Over-The-Horizon Radar Tech appeared first on TWZ.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has retired the last of its P-3 Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft. The AEW version is instantly recognizable from the saucer-like radar dome on top, as seen on other AEW types like the E-2 Hawkeye and the E-3 Sentry. CBP was the only operator of this variant of the P-3 Orion and is said to have been the only law enforcement agency to fly any kind of dedicated AEW plane. The retirement of these aircraft comes at a time when American AEW assets, in general, are under heavy strain by demands globally.

CBP officially retired its final P-3 AEW on September 30, 2026, after a final flight from National Air Security Operations Center Jacksonville (NASOC Jacksonville), in Jacksonville, Florida. CBP has also flown Long Range Tracker (LRT) variants of the P-3, configured for more traditional maritime surveillance missions. The current plans for the LRT aircraft, and whether their sunset may also be on the horizon, are not immediately clear, and TWZ has reached out for more information. Orions of all types have been steadily disappearing from service with the U.S. military and elsewhere across the U.S. government as the aging aircraft become more difficult to operate and maintain.

End of the Road: AMO’s Iconic P-3 Dome Takes Its Final Flight!

On September 30, 2026, the distinct silhouette of a four-engine turboprop carrying its massive rotating radar dome touched down for the final time at the National Air Security Operations Center in Jacksonville.

Our… pic.twitter.com/doT9TZYJzD

— CBP AMO (@CBPAMO) October 1, 2026

“Our Jacksonville-based P-3 AEW fleet has served as a cornerstone of America’s outer-layer border security,” according to a brief announcement from CBP about the retirement on social media. “Its crews flew far beyond our borders, providing wide-area surveillance across the Caribbean, Gulf of America [Gulf of Mexico], and the transit zones of Central and South America, helping detect and track threats before they could reach the United States.”

By all indications, including official CBP sources, the P-3 AEW fleet consisted of eight aircraft at its peak. There is a confusingly worded 2014 CBP press release that mentions an “11th and final Lockheed Martin P-3 Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft overhaul,” but that figure looks to also include three of the six LRT versions. The same release says that CBP only had 14 P-3s of all types at that time.

What was then known as the U.S. Customs Service (USCS) first began operating the P-3 AEW version in the late 1980s. The aircraft were converted from second-hand maritime patrol variants of the Orion. The first example had started life as a P-3B for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Ex-U.S. Navy P-3s were also converted.

The initial three P-3 AEWs were equipped with the AN/APS-138 radar. The same radar was used on early E-2C Hawkeye airborne early warning and control aircraft operated by the U.S. Navy, as well as several other armed forces internationally.

“The Customs Service had previously borrowed U.S. Navy E-2Cs to meet its antinarcotics surveillance requirements, but required an aircraft with longer range and on-station time,” according to a 2006 report from Forecast International. “In June 1989, the U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on the drug interdiction P-3B AEW aircraft. The findings indicated that the radar performance was as specified, but the P-3B (when compared to the E-2C) was less costly to operate per square mile of area covered because of the higher cruising speed and longer endurance. The P-3B had at least twice the in-flight endurance of the E-2C.”

Starting in the 1990s, USCS began the process of acquiring additional P-3 AEWs with newer AN/APS-145 radars, as also used on later model E-2Cs. The original AEW Orions were eventually refitted with APS-145s, as well. It’s worth noting here that the U.S. Coast Guard separately moved to acquire an AEW version of the C-130H, designated the EC-130V, in the 1990s, which used the AN/APS-125 radar, also used on older E-2s. Budget cuts led to the end of that program. The EC-130V that had been built was redesignated as an NC-130H and subsequently used for test purposes.

The P-3 AEWs were also equipped with a sensor turret containing electro-optical and infrared (EO/IR) video cameras, allowing the aircraft to more closely investigate targets spotted on radar. CBP regularly conducted P-3 operations that paired AEWs with LRT variants to provide an even broader array of sensor capabilities on missions. The LRTs have EO/IR sensor turrets, as well as AN/APG-66 and SeaVue radars. The pulse-doppler AN/APG-66 is primarily designed for spotting and tracking aerial targets, and was originally used on early variants of the F-16 fighter. SeaVue is a multi-function type with surface search and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery modes. Images produced via SAR are highly detailed maps of the surface below, and can be captured day or night, and regardless of any cloud cover, smoke, or dust. 

Beyond radars and other sensors, the P-3 AEWs also had a robust communications suite consisting of VHF and UHF radios, as well as satellite communications links by the end of their career. CBP’s entire P-3 fleet, including the AEWs and LRTs, has received various updates over the years, including new ‘glass cockpits’ starting in the early 2000s.

Though primarily employed in support of counter-narcotics interdiction operations, the airborne radar and command and control capabilities were also applied to other missions, including disaster relief and humanitarian assistance efforts at home and abroad. As an example, CBP’s P-3 AEWs helped with air traffic coordination, as well as provided other support, during relief efforts in Texas in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

At the same time, CBP’s entire P-3 fleet, including both the AEW and LRT versions, has only been getting increasingly older and difficult to sustain. The P-3B variant first entered U.S. Navy service in the 1960s. CBP did put its P-3s through a Service Life Extension Program overhaul in the 2010s, which included “new wings and tail for each aircraft and completely strips down the aircraft to its bare metal for an inspection,” according to a 2014 press release.

As mentioned, the P-3 family has been in steadily dwindling service in the United States, overall, in recent years. The U.S. Navy has completely retired the Orion as a maritime patrol platform, and the service has also fully divested its more specialized EP-3 intelligence-gathering variants. The Navy had retained a small number of P-3s for research and development and test and evaluation activities, but growing sustainment challenges have been prompting the retirement of those planes, as well. The last NP-3C assigned to the Navy’s Scientific Development Squadron One (VXS-1), the “Warlocks,” was also retired last month. VXS-1 previously operated a ‘domed’ NP-3D, similar to, but distinct from, CBP’s P-3 AEWs, as well. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is also in the process of replacing its pair of P-3s, configured as civilian hurricane hunter aircraft, with new C-130J Hercules-based platforms. The shrinking U.S. Orion operator base can only have a knock-on impact on CBP P-3 operations.

A key question now is how CBP will fill any gaps left by the retirement of the final AEW version. The agency does continue to operate a mix of other crewed fixed-wing aircraft with mixtures of radars and other sensors, as well as MQ-9 drones, but none of these platforms are equipped with a sensor like the AN/APS-145. CBP also has a network of tethered aerostats with radars at fixed sites around the Caribbean. As an aside, General Atomics, together with Saab, is now working on an AEW configuration for the MQ-9B drone, but there are no known U.S. orders for that capability at the time of writing. That platform will not offer the same level of flexibility and look-down capability as modern crewed AEW aircraft, either. Look-down AEW capability is only growing in importance today amid expanding and evolving drone threats, including to the U.S. homeland.

High demand for AEW support, in general, means that the U.S. military regularly steps in to provide additional coverage with U.S. Navy E-2s and U.S. Air Force E-3s to aid in U.S. counter-drug operations around Latin America. Newer E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes notably have far more powerful radars than the E-2C or the P-3 AEW, with added surface search and track capability, too. At the same time, as mentioned at the start, those assets are in heavy demand, especially in light of the conflict with Iran. On top of that, the Air Force’s E-3 fleet is facing serious sustainment challenges itself, with replacement E-7 Wedgetail aircraft still years away from being delivered.

The Air Force, in particular, is also aiming to eventually push most, if not all, air moving-target indicator (AMTI) tasks currently performed by aircraft like the E-3 and E-7 into space. The service is heavily investing to accelerate the fielding of those capabilities, which could eventually offer revolutionary constant, persistent coverage globally. The first of those satellites are still not expected to reach an early operational state until 2028. It is possible that CBP could get access to a tailored data feed from this system when it does become operational. It still does not obviate the need to have crewed or uncrewed aircraft capable of more closely investigating tracks of interest using EO/IR cameras and other sensors.

Whatever the future might now hold, CBP’s unique time as the operator of the P-3 AEW aircraft has come to an end.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post The P-3 Orion Airborne Early Warning Aircraft Has Flown Its Last Mission appeared first on TWZ.